Reviews of art, culture and literature

Category: The Jackdaw

“Imagine the most absurd and outrageous provocations about art that you can. For example: there is no such thing as a pure work of art; artists are unusually ill-informed; there is no market reward for good art; government subsidies make artists poor. Both defensive supporters of state funding and critical traditionalists will be muttering that art should not be viewed as an economic product or an investment. Both sides believe that art and money should be separated; the influence of money in the art market is deleterious to the production/appreciation of art. Yet how many of these assumptions are accurate and where is the economic evidence to back up these views?

Artist and social economist, Professor Hans Abbing has looked at the fine arts (encompassing dance, classical – not pop – music, opera and theatre but primarily concentrating on the visual fine arts) and sees an economy that does not function like any other. In Why Are Artists Poor? Abbing seeks to understand how this singular market operates, drawing on academic research and statistics and demonstrating through anecdotal examples. Some of Abbing’s findings make profoundly uncomfortable reading for people who accept many common assumptions about the arts. Here are Abbing’s main findings…”

This year a sculpture by Sam Durant entitled Scaffold was erected in a sculpture park managed by Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. The wooden sculpture juxtaposed elements of playground-activity structures and gallows. One minor aspect of Scaffold referred to the hanging of Dakota Native Americans in 1862 as part of struggles between the Dakota Nation and the American government. That reference had been missed until it was pointed out, at which time a campaign to remove the sculpture was begun by the Dakota. “This is a murder machine that killed our people because we were hungry,” said a member of the Dakota Nation, equating Scaffold with an actual gallows that hanged members of the Dakota. In May the museum destroyed Scaffold and the artist renounced his work.

This year there was a protest by some black artists against the display at the Whitney Biennial of a painting of murdered black activist Emmett Till. Black activists lobbied to have the painting by Dana Schutz, a white artist, removed as offensive and hurtful. “The subject matter is not Schutz’s,” said one protestor, claiming ownership and authority over the representation of a historical event.

In these two cases, activists claimed ownership over aspects of history in order to suppress art works. In one case it resulted in the destruction of art. Pressure groups have noticed the weakness of curators, administrators and politicians and their unwillingness to protect art from censorship. Sympathetic towards notions of social justice, administrators sometimes submit to emotional blackmail by groups which demand censorship…”

“The canon of great art has never been the target of greater ire than it is today, but many leftist critics and their traditionalist opponents misunderstand the canon. The truth is unsettling for both groups. This essay seeks to clarify the nature of the canon at a time when it is an especially contentious subject.

Great Deeds Against the Dead

Last year art-history A-level was scrapped due to low take-up, then, after a campaign to reverse the decision, it was reinstated. This allowed New Criticism a foothold in school art-history teaching. When the new curriculum was developed, there was a downgrading of the master artists of Europe. Sarah Phillips, designer of new art-history syllabus, said “It is a global specification. Students won’t just study the work of dead white men. They will have the opportunity to study Islamic architecture and work by men and women of all colours and creeds.” Perhaps students will be tested on artist skin colour in exams.

“Art history is the study of power, politics, identity and humanity; it makes perfect sense to keep the exam,” said Jeremy Deller. One doesn’t envy students wanting to learn about painting only to be dragooned into political-education courses and harangued on the purported crimes of their forefathers, who were more likely to have been agricultural labourers toiling in fields than redcoats bayonetting babies in India. Perhaps A-level art history would have better remained decently defunct…”

“With the opening of a new building adjoining the Tate Modern Bankside site, and the appointment of a new director, Dr Maria Balshaw, things seem buoyant at the Tate. Yet below the surface the organisation is headed towards crisis.

“Although you wouldn’t know it from the fawning accolades of newspaper profilers, Balshaw’s appointment alarms art historians. Balshaw, the new director of Britain’s largest fine-art museum, with four venues and £1.3 billion in assets, is not an art historian but a student of literature who attained a doctorate in critical theory, specialising in American authors. Critical theory is an academic branch of postmodernism that, preferring to concentrate on art’s ideological and social role, sees no qualitative difference between high and low (or popular) art forms. This might be a problematic grounding for the director of Britain’s largest collection of high art. Hitherto in her roles as head of the Whitworth and Manchester art galleries, she has demonstrated no detailed understanding of fine art or any willingness to defy fashion, exhibiting and collecting art on an agenda underpinned by identity politics and feminism.

“Indeed, Balshaw is a proactive and politically driven individual who will not be taking a backseat position. She has previously made statements that women and minority artists should be given a more prominent position in the arts world. As explained previously on spiked, the relatively low number of female artists in the Tate collection is due to historical restrictions on women artists that no longer exist. However, for feminists, that statistical imbalance justifies the promotion of women artists regardless of the quality of their art.

“If the Tate was a stable or manageable organisation, then a figurehead leader would be a viable proposition. Unfortunately, the Tate has huge and ever-increasing problems…”

“Bruised by negative reactions to his solo exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery in winter 1950, Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) was intent on proving himself in 1951. When the weather warmed enough to start painting in his studio-shed he embarked on a series of large paintings – diluted black enamel on raw cotton duck. From May to September 1951 Pollock produced 28 paintings, which came to be called the Black Paintings. Some of these Black Paintings and associated work is now gathered on display in Liverpool (Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots, Tate Liverpool, closes 18 October).

“Pollock felt that to counter criticisms that his work was becoming decorative and insubstantial, he should use figurative elements and a single colour. The grand subjects of conflict, war, death and the nude must also have seemed suitably powerful as a riposte to the accusation of insubstantiality. Pollock was deeply attached to imagery of atavistic intensity. His admiration for Albert Pinkham Ryder and his studies of history painting under Thomas Hart Benton suggested an American artist could draw from a kitty of essential themes. His experience of drawing dreams as part of Jungian analysis showed that the deep wellspring of unconscious symbols was something he could use.

“All the time Pollock painted the Black Paintings, he had to struggle with the problem of representation as seen through the prism of critical debates of the era. How could an abstract artist prove he had skill and seriousness without resorting to conventional figuration?…”

Read the full article on Jackson Pollock, a review of the Prud’hon exhibition in London and a review of a new book on Max Beckmann only in the print version of THE JACKDAW no.123, Sept/Oct 2015, single issues and subscriptions available here: http://www.thejackdaw.co.uk/

There are times when circumstances prevent an accurate view of living artists. Mostly this is due to the necessity of allowing time to elapse between creation of art and its assessment. Sometimes it is to do with the critical atmosphere of a period or an artist engineering a false impression of his work. Critics’ ranking games can turn artists into figureheads or sticks with which to beat bogeymen. It is a rare writer on art who does not have a favourite living artist.

If an artist is well known enough the cult of personality can almost occlude the art. A peculiarity of the received truths about Lucian Freud is that most are untrue (or at least no longer true). “He is a recluse.” Never has a recluse been so often spotted at expensive restaurants, night clubs and exclusive art events. For someone so private we are remarkably well supplied with anecdotes about his life and opinions. “He rarely grants interviews,” yet you will find a number of books and magazines including interviews. His one-hour televised interview recorded in the late 1980s seems to have been overlooked. He “remains aloof from the art market” yet he exhibits internationally with commercial art dealers. He co-operates with curators and uses his old-master status to take full advantage of opportunities open to few other painters (exhibiting in the Wallace Collection, for example). Few artists would refuse these temptations and Freud is no different. “He is rarely photographed.” This last was actually true up to the 1970s but since then whole coffee-table books of photographs of the artist in his studio have been published.

The most pervasive myth is that Freud is a realist and that his realism that has been becoming progressively more acute. The early paintings employed a naïve style (enlarged eyes and oversize heads) which was soon replaced a more straightforward approach. At this time Freud was most engaged with realism. It was only a brief interlude. In the early 1960s new traits emerged: elongated figures and floorboards zooming away in one-point perspective. The painter began to emphasise the high viewpoint from the late 1960s. (These tendencies became stomach-sinking features of many student entries for the BP Portrait Award, demonstrating how Freud has been taken as a model for aspiring realists.) There was a phase in the 1980s when the paint surface became clotted and granular, which we were told was a by-product of Freud’s perfectionism and extended periods of reworking. Why then did this vanish within ten years? Did Freud solve a problem, drop a mannerism or find an effect counterproductive? The enlarged feet, attenuated limbs and undersize heads of subjects have persisted for years and undermine otherwise persuasive depictions. His mannerisms have ossified into the Freud Style.

Distortions do not detract from Degas’s art; they reintroduce us to the human form in a startling way. With Freud’s art one gets a feeling these are unintended deficiencies he finds uncorrectable. Degas wanted the artificial and to add an accent of nature to it. Freud starts from life and finds his paintings deviating, becoming wayward beneath his brush. In itself this is a curious phenomenon; it does not accord with the view of the painter as a realist. Freud’s deviations seem unintentional; they are certainly distracting. To admire Freud for an attribute, pitiless realism, he does not possess diminishes his actual achievements. Is Freud being cast as a realist only in order to be used by writers to disparage other artists? The painter now less of a realist than he was in 1955.

None of these falsehoods are entirely the painter’s fault. However, he does exert a high degree of influence over the critics close to him and is responsible for engineering an “authorised version”. Every artist has this right and some exercise it more than Freud. However, it should not go unchallenged.

For years he did not reveal the identities of his sitters. Now they are frequently named in titles. Many sitters are famous. When it comes to celebrity, Freud has more in common with Warhol than Vermeer, which is not a criticism, just something that goes unremarked upon too often by critics who think of him as a modern Velázquez. The irony is that far from being a Velázquez, Freud is a court painter the way Picasso was – painting subjects at his own court.

One distinctive feature is Freud’s enduring trouble with composition. Often paintings are started only for the painter to have the canvas extended in order for him to compensate for his initial mistake. For an artist who actually sketches his work in charcoal on the canvas before he starts, these lapses are startling. Degas was a predecessor who extended grounds after starting work. If one studies Degas’s pastels it becomes apparent that the majority of these extensions are to expand the space around figures, allowing more air into the pictures, not to accommodate central motifs. In Freud’s case it is almost invariably because substantial parts of subjects are lopped off by the support edge. It is reasonable to argue that repositioning the ground around a motif is equivalent to moving that motif on the ground. What that does not do is explain why a painter might be having such serious and persistent problems tackling relatively simple compositions. That major alterations to his canvases are treated by his advocates as merely anecdotal asides rather than diagnosed as the symptom of an underlying problem tells us all we need to know about the standards Freud’s art is held to. Numerous sheets where he has drawn in pastel over etchings, extending a forehead cropped by a plate edge, are exercises in compensation compared to Degas’s nuancing of monotypes with pastel.

An artist who had studied figure painting in a conventional manner might be less prone to these tendencies – or would at least work harder to curb them. Freud studied only briefly at Goldsmiths College and Central School (sources differ on this) and was greatly influenced by his teacher at East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham, Cedric Morris (1889-1982). Morris was a self-taught naïve artist. There is little to distinguish between Freud’s approach in his earliest paintings and Morris’s own. The naïve style allows an artist at the very beginning of his career to make finished works of art, circumventing the trial and error that characterises the usual trajectory of a student striving for naturalism. The naïve approach prioritises making complete statements. It cloaks deficiencies of a practitioner. That is not what the naïve style is for but what it effectively does. Facilitated by his ability to produce finished pictures before his apprenticeship was over, Freud had an attentive and appreciative public from his teenage years, lauded by distinguished mentors (Francis Bacon, Herbert Read, Stephen Spender and Christian Bérard). While his peers were formulating their languages, Freud was feted and selling work.

This is not to denigrate Freud’s accomplishments. He is a dedicated artist. He is, considering the prolonged gestations of his pictures, a prolific artist. He created some of the best figure paintings of the second half of the Twentieth Century, admittedly a thin field. His Reflection (Self-portrait) (1985) is one of the best of all self-portraits of any century. It is unsparing, full of presence and power, painted with energy and economy. Had he been in competition with a really talented and committed realist he would likely have painted many more comparable pictures. Stamina is in itself admirable but greatness rests on more than one outstanding trait.

The prerequisite for being a great artist is more than painting some good paintings (and the occasional wonderful one). It demands consistency. He is a hit-and-miss artist partly because he has never been subjected to the competition and companionship of a cohort of talented realists. A number of works should never have left the studio. Balthus, with all his limitations, painted only when he had something to paint and never let a bad work out of his studio. Balthus was a model of integrity and discipline. Consider Vermeer, who is in part highly regarded because, in his less than 40 extant paintings, he hardly ever put a foot wrong. He had a magical combination of brilliance and originality allied to a consistency which is absent only in his pre-mature works and wavered in only a handful of late paintings. Whether this high standard in surviving work was due to Vermeer’s slow rate of production or to depredation (or a touch of both) we cannot now tell.

Freud’s late self-portraits (Self-portrait: Reflection (2002) and The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer (2004-5)) are painfully poor. The modelling is deficient and the physiognomy wayward. In one of his stronger paintings, Lying by the Rags (1989-90), Freud captures well the model’s weight pushing out the backs of her thighs. Observation and recording are in confluence. It is a wonderfully well-judged work, vivid and visually engaging. In the late self-portraits that sense of volume and weight has gone. However, this is not to imply Freud is worsening; he is as erratic as he has always been. In that respect alone he is consistent. The point is that only the most peculiar of artists could be capable of the 1985 self-portrait and have considered the later paintings adequate. Could none of his acquaintances criticise the canvases whilst they were in the studio? Freud is a poor editor of his own work and no dealer or curator has the stature or courage to do the editing for him. Why does he make so much of his variable output public?

The painter, for all his talk about “not wanting to repeat himself” compositionally, seems incapable of not perpetuating his errors and mannerisms. Quite beyond the contingent problems of the picture at hand, the best painters seek to correct themselves. Freud’s early success as a naïve artist may have suggested to him that he need not be subject to the same constraints and apprenticeship most painters are. His painting has changed but not evolved.

Though an artist cannot be blamed for the distortions of his advocates, he must be held accountable for his own shortcomings. If proponents of Freud’s art suggest he is an upholder of figurative standards stretching back to Rubens (whatever that means), why has his art not been subjected to comparable scrutiny? It could be because realism has a somewhat degraded status today and that painting from life is now an activity marginal to most practising artists. There are plenty of reasons not to tackle life painting, that anachronistic spur that juts so awkwardly from the main body of contemporary art. It is much easier for critics to discuss issues related to Conceptual and video art than it is to analyse the art. Has it been tacitly accepted that Freud is a realist mainly because there are no realists of stature working today who would show him to be the Mannerist he is? Has this blind spot developed because of a dearth of astute criticism on Freud?

Freud is not in the mould of a Sixteenth-Century Mannerist, who distorts knowingly and systematically to highlight the artificiality of practise and to oppose the restraint and order of Classicism, but is an artist unwittingly at the mercy of his technical deficiencies, which distort his attempt to paint realistically. He is closer to Alberto Giacometti than to Parmigianino, and should be looked at not next to Rubens and Watteau but Stanley Spencer, Marlene Dumas, Odd Nerdrum and Jean Rustin. Then we might be able to see what Freud does and not what his proponents claim he does.

“New York City, home to great collections of art, is never short of key works by important artists to measure against one another. Autumn 2011, three displays have coincided to allow people to compare the skills of a modern master with those of a predecessor who influenced him. Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) revered J.A.D. Ingres (1780-1867) for both his devotion to the human figure and technical skill (in drawing especially). De Kooning vowed he would never paint a tree and his art never strayed too far from the portrait or nude, even at its most abstracted. Likewise, Ingres never manifested much interest in landscape and still-life either. Both painters were noted by peers as being consummate painters of flesh, principally female.

“MoMA claim that De Kooning: A Retrospective (until 9 January) is the “first major museum exhibition devoted to the full scope of the career of Willem de Kooning”. As the current survey includes work from 1983-7 not included in a much larger 1983 retrospective shown in Berlin and New York (the current show has 195 works, the earlier one had 280) the press release is technically accurate while being a touch grandiloquent.

“Filling the sixth floor of the new MoMA building for the first time, the retrospective provides some surprises and confirms some expectations…”

“The effects of Liverpool’s time as City of Culture in 2008 are still becoming apparent as various building projects reach completion. Liverpool has many excellent museums, to which number the Museum of Liverpool is due to be added. My visit to Liverpool was before the museum’s opening on July 19th, so I made do with two significant shows which will run until the autumn: a survey of Magritte and a partial reconstruction of a pioneering exhibition of Post-Impressionist art held at the Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool in 1911. (The Bluecoat Gallery itself has recently been refurbished. The excellent diverse bookshop and the well-stocked art-materials store have both left and the gallery, which occasionally hosted worthwhile shows, now runs an exhibition programme of the driest and least engaging type. What was once a hub of artistic activity has been reduced to a deracinated husk. Best to bypass it entirely and visit the newly relocated Probe Records next door instead.)

“The 1910-11 display “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” at the Grafton Gallery, London is a celebrated landmark in British Modernism. What is less well-known is that the show (minus the Manets) travelled to Liverpool before the pictures were dispersed. Art in Revolution: Liverpool 1911 (Walker Art Gallery, closes September 25th) is an investigation of the second display, which included local Liverpool artists alongside the French painters. The French artists included Denis, Derain, Matisse, Picasso, Serusier, Signac, Vlaminck and others…”

“How often have we seen – of late – exhibitions of Modern masters with didactic subtitles? These subtitles tell us why we should visit this exhibition when we have seen so many on this particular artist before. It is the subtitle that gives us the curatorial slant. What happens is not that famous artists get “played out” but that curators and curatorial imperatives get played out. Museum directors and curators naturally want to show great artists but, unless inaccessible art is made available, there are really only two routes for monograph retrospectives: greatest hits or the hidden side of X. Recently we have seen a spate of the second approach; witness Picasso the Communist, Picasso the Surrealist, Picasso the erotic artist.

“Two exhibitions of Joan Miró (1893-1983) in London and Brussels this summer take different approaches. The London display is subtitled “The Ladder of Escape” and aims to revise our view of the artist, while the Brussels display, one on a much smaller scale, is subtitled “Peintre Poète” and presents a more conventional view of the painter. The Brussels exhibition conceives of the artist as lyrical, straining to escape the boundaries of conventional restrictions and mores, whereas the London one purports to uncover an overlooked political dimension to Miró’s art. I visited the Brussels display in person but I am assessing the London one from the catalogue…”

“Most YBAs achieved prominence by recasting genuine avant-garde art in a palatable commercial form, influenced by advertising and pop culture, and served up to a credulous public largely ignorant of the original sources of the art. (Something Julian Stallabrass discusses in his book High Art Lite.) Jenny Saville was seen as one exception by virtue of the facts she studied in Glasgow, not Goldsmith’s College, and painted figures representationally in a non-ironic manner. Yet on closer study, Saville is not dissimilar to her YBA peers. Since paintings were acquired from her college studio, Saville’s paintings have changed from billboard Lucian Freuds to hybrids of Freud, Bacon and de Kooning. Her painting rests upon adapting recent art and presenting it in a more extreme form (larger than that by the original artists), shorn of the original art’s foundations and complex origins, just as the art of other YBAs does.

“The paintings have been described as “monumental” by writers who cannot differentiate between monumental and big. Likewise, painting something from a very close viewpoint (a Saville tic) does not convey monumentality or help us comprehend the mass of a figure. Monumentality has nothing to do with size; it has do with the impression of size, which can be conveyed through adjusting the size of a motif relative to the picture surface, elimination of detail, lowering the observer’s viewpoint of the motif, reduction of colour, simplification of form and emphasis on the mass of a motif. Picasso could achieve this concisely in modestly sized paintings and drawings (those of the Boisgeloup period, the Dinard bathers and the Gosol figures), as can any artist who applies the principles. Painting fat figures on large surfaces tells us nothing about fatness but it reveals the painter’s insecurity, her need to bolster insubstantial depictions of bodies by expanding them to cinema-screen scale…”